The UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) delegation representing the Arab League at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2014, held in Busan, Korea for the past three weeks, announced that the ITU has approved a work paper submitted by the Arab League.

The paper was based on a UAE suggestion to support youth innovations in ICT. In addition, discussions were held around new work papers, and amendments on existing papers presented to the ITU Council, where the UAE delegation is highly active in the discussion of those papers, in order to mobilize the necessary support on the issues raised in these papers by the UAE. Lead by the UAE, the Arab League has submitted 41 work papers at the current ITU Conference.

Receiving a worldwide recognition, the most important proposal submitted by the Arab League within a UAE-lead initiative, was an innovative smart application for continuous interaction with civil aircrafts during flights, via land and space links. The proposal aims at identifying the aircraft’s location and tracks flight progress in a continuous manner, monitoring its location with the latest coordinates. This will in turn allow appropriate action to be taken in the event of disasters, such as the Malaysian airplane accident and disappearance.

The conference’s Fifth Committee discussed a range of work papers today, including the Arab League paper on revealing the Union’s documents to the public, which has been covered in a specific meeting. All discussions stressed on the importance of transparency and openness within the limits that protect privacy and ensure preservation of confidentiality of certain documents.

It was made clear the differences between privacy and security standards, resulting in the session chairman calling upon the creation of a committee comprised of the states with suggestions, visions, amendments or comments on the paper, in order to form a small team to reach a common understanding in this regards. The UAE delegation represented by Eng. Nasser bin Hammad welcomed the suggestion, and stressed on the need to take all views into consideration, particularly the Arab League vision which initiated the proposal.

More work papers were also discussed, including a paper submitted by SITTEL on the theft of mobile devices. The paper focuses on the need to coordinate the world’s efforts to develop a global database on stolen hardware, and the issuance of guidelines to help third world countries in particular, enabling them to resolve this issue, which was described by the Russian delegate as the grey market of stolen devices.

The Colombian delegate indicated that this problem is becoming a global concern, affecting economical, legal and security-related aspects, and pointed out that the United States has registered 3.1 million stolen mobile phones in 2013, and the same level of seriousness is being faced in rest of the world.